Summary:

The parts I was waiting for arrived. I finished the beat mouth assembly, and did some characterization. Everything looks to be working as expected.

Details:

Attachment #1: Photo of the front panel. I am short of two fiber mating sleeves that are compatible with PM fibers, but those are just for monitoring, so not critical to the assembly at this stage. I'll ask Chub to procure these.

Attachment #2: Photo of the inside of the BeatMouth. I opted to use the flexible RG-316 cables for all the RF interconnects. Rana said these aren't the best option, remains to be seen if interference between cables is an issue. If so, we can replace them with RG-58. I took the opportunity to give each fiber beam splitter its own spool, and cleaned all the fiber tips.

Attachment #3: Transfer function measurement. The PDFR setup behind 1X5/1X6 was used. I set the DC current to the laser to 30.0 mA (as read off the display of the current source), which produced ~400uW of light at the fiber coupled output of the diode laser. This was injected into the "PSL" input coupler of the BeatMouth, and so gets divided down to ~100 uW by the time it reaches the PDs. From the DC monitor values (~430mV), the light hitting the PDs is actually more consistent with 60uW, which is in agreement with the insertion loss of the fiber beamsplitters, and the mating sleeves.

The two responses seem reasonably well balanced (to within 20% - do we expect this to be better?). Even though judging by the DC monitor, there was more light incident on the Y PD than on the X PD, the X response was actually stronger than the Y. 

I also took the chance to do some other tests:

• Inject light into the "X(Y)-ARM" input coupler of the Beat Mouth - confirmed that only the X(Y) NF1611's DC monitor output showed any change. The DC light level was ~1V in this condition, which again is consistent with expected insertion losses as compared to the "PSL" input case, there is 1 less fiber beamsplitter and mating sleeve.
• Injected light into each of the input couplers, looked at the interior of the BeatMouth with an IR viewer for evidence of fiber damage, and saw none. Note that we are not doing anything special to dump the light at the unused leg of the fiber beamsplitter (which will eventually be a monitor port). Perhaps, nominally, this port should be dumped in some appropriate way.

Attachment #4: Dark Noise analysis. I used a ZHL-500-HLN+ to boost the PD's dark noise above the AG4395's measurement noise floor. The measured noise level seems to suggest either (i) the input-referred current noise of the PD circuitry is a little lower than the spec of 16 pA/rtHz (more like 13 pA/rtHz) or (ii) the transimpedance is lower than the spec of 700 V/A (more like 600 V/A). Probably some combination of the two. Seems reasonable to me.

Next steps:

The optical part of the ALS detection setup is now complete. The next step is to measure the ALS noise with this sysytem. I will use the X arm for this purpose (I'd like to make the minor change of switching the existing resistive power splitter at the delay line to the newly acquired splitters which have 3dB lower insertion loss).